I'm a tongue-talking, holy-rolling, radical lefty (at least by North Carolina standards) Jesus-lover. Beyond that, I'm just your average Southern-fried Democrat.
Talking points on Anthony Martin-Trigona, alias Andy Martin
So let's summarize what we now know for sure about the primary source of the "Obama is a Muslim" smear, Anthony Martin-Trigona, alias Andy Martin. This, I believe, should be more than enough to blow apart any shred of credibility the "Obama is a Muslim" rumors still have.
I'm hoping to compile enough to send to some of my born-again friends ... granted, quite a few of them aren't voting for Obama anyway, but if I can stop them from spreading these smears it'll make some difference.
Public Policy Polling confirms what we already knew--North Carolina is in play presidentially. However, news from the Senate race here isn't quite as encouraging.
On the presidential side, McCain only leads Obama 45-41--just one point over the margin of error. Barr gets 5 percent. Note, this is a Democratic polling firm--but as with the last poll from NC, from a Republican polling firm, there's virtually no good news for McCain.
On the Senate side, however, Liddy Dole appears to be pulling away from Kay Hagan. She now leads 51 percent to 38 percent ... and the trends suggest Hagan's got some work to do.
Now that we know the identity of the guy who started the "Obama is a Muslim" rumors--namely, perennial candidate and vexatious litigant Anthony Martin-Trigona, alias Andy Martin--the next question is how to push back against him. And there might be a way. Seems Mr. Martin-Trigona is a fugitive.
Martin ran for a Florida State Senate seat in 1996, but it came unraveled due to anti-Semitic remarks he'd made a decade earlier while running for Congress from Connecticut. After the election, he assaulted two TV cameramen and was sentenced to a year in jail. And then ...
He was freed pending an appeal but was ordered right back to jail -- this time for seven months -- for contempt of court when he turned to television cameras inside a civil courtroom to say that the sitting judge was "bought and paid for" and a "psychiatric case."
After Martin served the first month, deputies released him prematurely by accident. Martin didn't look back, so a warrant was put out for his arrest. After losing his appeal on the criminal charges, he owes Palm Beach County about 16 months in jail.
Survey USA just released a new poll showing Obama ahead of McCain by 2 points in Ohio--a statistical dead heat, since the MoE is 4.2 percent.
I don't know what to make of this poll. On one hand, it shows Obama leading by four in Cincy--the definition of a purple metro area (Cincy itself is light blue, but the suburbs are crimson red). He's also beating McCain like a rented mule among moderate voters, 55-36. It also shows McCain up six in Columbus--as I understand it, the Columbus burbs are even redder than the Cincy burbs. But on the other hand ... 90 percent of Latinos prefer McCain, and Obama's only up 11 in Cleveland, the most Democratic area of the state.
If this poll is true, a poll done a few days earlier by Dem firm Public Policy Polling is officially an outlier. It shows Obama up 50-39--results even I have trouble believing because if Obama were up that much in Ohio, this race would be over.
In the past few weeks, we've seen the delightful sight of Obama being competitive in states no Democrat should even be thinking about ... Georgia, Indiana, Nebraska and now Mississippi. It raises the obvious question--how close does it have to be in normally crimson-red states to know McCain's been capsized by an Obama tsunami?
A few weeks ago, I did some admittedly unscientific analysis and concluded that while Obama has 171 electoral votes in the bag, McCain's got only 85. Which means there's a whole lot of normally red territory that McCain's going to have to work harder to defend than normal--Kansas, Nebraska, Georgia, Indiana, Montana and even Arizona. Granted, many of these states will go for McCain except if Obama manages to rack up 380 votes or more. While my best-case scenario presently has Obama winning by "only" 369-169, here's my rough guess as to how close it has to be in some red states for there to be a complete wipeout.
Zimbabwe's government should put off Friday's scheduled presidential runoff, since a vote held under current conditions "would lack all legitimacy," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said Monday.
Speaking as the Security Council prepared to hold talks on the issue, Ban called the withdrawal of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai "understandable" and said a runoff "would only deepen divisions within the country and produce a result that could not be seen as credible."
"There has been too much violence, too much intimidation," he said.
Tsvangirai has taken refuge in the Dutch Embassy, and is also calling for a UN investigation of Mugabe. For his part, Mugabe is blowing it off--he's claiming he's already won since Tsvangirai is out of the race.
In a bit of irony, Condi calls Mugabe's actions a "continuing campaign of violence against its own people." Next step, I would think, would be sanctions. But should we wait for the UN on this, or impose sanctions ourselves?
A few days ago, I wrote about my frustration at having one of my pentecostal/charismatic friends jump on my case about my support of Obama. Well, I think I may be close to winning over one of them.
Pat McCrory, the Repub candidate for governor of North Carolina, has been the mayor of my hometown, Charlotte, for 13 years. He's been able to pull it off in an increasingly blue city because he's a moderate Republican by North Carolina standards--and in part because the Democrats haven't put up a real fight in a mayoral race in recent memory despite a huge advantage in registration.
So you'd think that he'd want to stay away from the most unpopular president in recent memory, right? Wrong.
A fundraiser today for Republican gubernatorial nominee Pat McCrory is set to feature a big name and a small profile.
President Bush is scheduled to visit the North Carolina capital to help raise money for the Charlotte mayor's statewide campaign. But the event -- at a private home and closed to the media -- is not designed to draw attention.
Proof positive of the fact there's something close to a Democratic lock in the Electoral College ... by my analysis, Obama starts out with a sizeable electoral vote lead, even more than the media's reporting. How's that? More below the fold.
Late Saturday night, I had the first of what I expect to be many conversations jumping on me about being a pentecostal/charismatic Christian who supports Barack Obama.
I buzzed an old friend of mine after seeing her on Myspace--I hadn't seen her in forever. She's a charismatic Christian--and an ardent Republican. After a little bit of small talk, out of nowhere she said, "There is no way in heck that Obama is a Christian." Apparently she noticed that I have a link to Fight the Smears on my status message in Yahoo. It went downhill from there ... more after the jump.
Not entirely surprising--RedState blogger Mark Impomeni is urging Shrub to disregard Boumediene v. Bush. What is surprising, however, is the line he's taking--SCOTUS itself may have committed an unconstitutional act.
The unpleasant fact overlooked by Justice Anthony Kennedy and the four justices who signed on to his majority opinion, is that in ruling the military tribunals set up by the Military Commissions Act to be unconstitutional, the Court itself committed an unconstitutional act. Congress, acting under its Article III power to regulate the judicial branch, stripped the Supreme Court of the jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from detainees in the custody of the United States when it passed and the president signed the Military Commissions Act.
Just one problem with that ... a problem named the Suspension Clause of the Constitution
The object of Reagan's anger? Mark Dice, a fundie Christian conspiracy theorist. In looking more into this Dice fellow, I find myself concluding that while he may be a loathsome character, we nonetheless need to defend him against Reagan's criminal threats against him.
Let's not beat around the bush. John Hagee may portray himself as the most zealously pro-Israel televangelist in the nation (at least among the big-time televangelists), but he's really an anti-Semite. I'm sorry, but when you start throwing around terms like "international finance," you've gone over the line. It's "polite" anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitic nonetheless.
So Faux News considers calling Michelle Obama a "baby mama" to be merely an "error in judgement" by a producer running the chyron. Sorry, not convinced.
Let's see here now. In the space of one month, we've had these beauties from the "fair and balanced" news channel:
Some wet-behind-the-ears producer at Faux News calls Michelle a "baby mama."
Sorry, but unless there is one whopper of a coincidence here, that wasn't just a mere error in judgement. But even without the earlier incidents, Roger Ailes has nada, zip, zero room for an excuse.
Mark Twain once said, "Never shoot a man who is hanging himself." Well, folks, it's time to give Joe Lieberman a little bit of rope.
As you all know by now, Lieberman once compared John Hagee to Moses. But four years before he made that comparison, the San Antonio Ayatollah suggested that the world's economic problems are due to those carnsarn European financiers (hat tip to Bruce Wilson of Talk2Action. For those who don't know, "European finance" is a byword for "Jews" in "polite" anti-Semitic circles. In other words, the most fanatically pro-Israel big-time televangelist in America has just jumped, head first, into the most pernicious anti-Semitic claptrap. Now if I were the most prominent observant Orthodox Jew in the nation, would you want to be in bed with this guy? I wouldn't.
As strange as this may sound, I've come to the conclusion that due to the seriousness of this president's crimes--specifically, the possibility that he may be guilty of murder--requires that I oppose his impeachment.
This isn't a conclusion to which I came lightly. I've been a member of the "impeach him, impeach him!" crowd since May '05, after the release of the Downing Street Memo. But according to a second, lesser-known UK memo, Bush had already decided to go to war as early as January 2003--with or without a UN resolution. If that is in fact true (and the White House hasn't disputed the memo's contents), then the Iraq war is an illegal war of aggression, and this president is guilty of at least second-degree murder. I've come to the conclusion that impeaching a president on such serious grounds during a presidential election year would seriously damage the legitimacy of any subsequent criminal trial---in part because the Republicans in the 109th Congress were not willing to stop being Republican Congressmen long enough.
I've been observing the furor over Joe Lieberman's support of John McCain, and I fear that unless we parse this correctly, it could backfire. Disastrously. We welcome Repubs' endorsement of our presidential candidates with open arms, so how do you justify the anger over Lieberman? It's very simple, really.
It's one thing to endorse another party's presidential candidate. But Lieberman's behavior has crossed the line on two aspects that need to be absolutely hammered into the ground--his possibly illegal work with Vets for Freedom and not doing more to combat the "Obama's a radical Muslim" canard. These are tailor-made talking points--let's use them!
